In 1961, Russia's finest dancer slipped through his keepers' fingers to defect to the West. But, years later, the Soviet secret police had their revenge. By John Bridcut
The KGB had seen it coming. When Rudolf Nureyev, the most promising young talent in Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, fled the Soviet Union for the West in June 1961, they were not surprised.
He was known for flouting house rules, and flirting with Western artists and ideas whenever he could. On the Kirov's tour of Paris in June 1961, he continually escaped his escorts to absorb French culture and friendship.
It was why the KGB had tried to restrict his foreign touring, and had even asked his own mother whether he was likely to defect.
At Le Bourget airport outside Paris, the KGB had it all planned. As the rest of the Kirov tour party boarded the plane to London, there was a tap on Nureyev's shoulder at the departure gate, and an urgent summons to Moscow to perform for General Secretary Khrushchev.
The burly men in the inevitable raincoats bungled it. Thanks to Nureyev's hysterical reaction and quick thinking by his French friends, he slipped through their fingers, and made his so-called "leap to freedom". But the KGB played a long game.
The defection was particularly embarrassing for Moscow because it came only three months after Yuri Gagarin's pioneering journey into space. Nureyev, once hailed as "the cosmonaut of the stage", dashed both pride and propaganda. The West was quick to claim a political victory.
But in truth his choice was practical rather than ideological. Nureyev had no interest in politics. He was a natural rebel against authority, whatever its political stripe. In Russia, he saw little chance of spreading his wings. So, with one or two discreet friends, he had been toying with defection, but he had made no plans. He just knew what he had to do when the moment came.
Paris was entranced by Nureyev's dancing, but off stage he irritated his French hosts just as much as his Russian minders.
Capricious and wilful, he behaved like a spoilt child. The dancer Pierre Lacotte was amazed at the latitude the Kirov had afforded him over costumes and wigs: he told Nureyev that, in Paris or London, a company dancer had to wear what he was told.
The sad truth that June was that most of his colleagues at the Kirov were glad to lose him. For the management he was simply trouble, while his fellow dancers relished filling the vacuum.
The KGB, however, wanted him back. His celebrated teacher, Alexander Pushkin, and his devoted student friend, Tamara Zakrzhevskaya, were ordered to write pleading letters; his father, a loyal communist, was pressed to fetch him; and Soviet sympathisers in Paris tried to destroy his confidence by pelting him with missiles and catcalls on stage.
When these efforts failed, the KGB made other plans, one of which was to break his legs. He was tried in his absence and sentenced to seven years in prison as a traitor.
Next, the KGB turned to his friends. Pushkin was repeatedly questioned, and suffered a heart attack.
The careers of Leonid Romankov and his twin sister Liuba, scientists whose interest in literature and art had stimulated Nureyev, were blighted because of their friendship with him. Tamara Zakrzhevskaya was expelled from university, and forbidden to travel even to Eastern Europe for 30 years, for the crime of knowing him.
"In this life," she says today, "you have to pay for everything. I had this friendship with Rudik [Nureyev]: it has stayed with me for my entire life. I don't regret anything."
His friends in Leningrad kept the Nureyev flame alight in secret. In a communal apartment in Gatchinskaya Street is a remarkable – and completely unknown – private archive, assembled by a bereft fan after his defection.
Faina Rokhind is 80: she first saw Nureyev dance at his graduation in 1958, and became one of those who showered him with flowers in Leningrad before anyone in the West had even heard of him.
While researching this Saturday's BBC documentary on Nureyev, I found myself in her room (no more than four metres by three) which is almost a shrine.
The walls are adorned with images of Nureyev in his prime, and the cupboards and shelves overflow with books, photograph albums, magazines, scrapbooks and videos – one woman's unique collection in defiance of Soviet authority.
In the rest of the Soviet Union, Nureyev became a non-person just as his international career was taking off. Russian books about ballet were recalled and every reference to Nureyev was literally cut out: he was excised from Soviet consciousness as though he had never been.
But through her job in a Leningrad library, Faina Rokhind had access to foreign magazines. In her mid-thirties she took up English so that she could decipher British and American articles, which she faithfully copied out into exercise books.
By studying dance notices, she reconstructed every moment of Nureyev's career in an elaborate timeline. She managed to procure his autobiography in English, photographed page by page, and translated into Russian to circulate samizdat among her friends.
In the weeks after his defection, Nureyev was lonely and depressed. He telephoned home: his father refused to speak to him, but his mother tugged at his heart-strings, with the KGB keenly listening in.
He called East Berlin to speak to the handsome German student, Teja Kremke, with whom he had had an affair in Leningrad. This time the Stasi were listening.
Nureyev pressed Kremke to join him in Paris and ease his loneliness. Kremke's mother insisted he complete his studies first, while his sister urged him to fly the nest. Kremke hesitated, and the Berlin Wall went up without warning. He was trapped. Teja and Rudolf, who had become "blood brothers", never met again.
In a letter, Kremke advised his "sweet Rudik" to stay in the West, but it was intercepted and the Stasi (in the manner of the recent film The Lives of Others) spied on Kremke relentlessly through two marriages and a drink problem, until his death in unexplained circumstances at the age of 37.
For some years, Nureyev spoke to him occasionally on the phone. He also met Kremke's Indonesian wife, Nuraini, who could travel to the West. After Teja's death, Nureyev signed a photograph for her – a magnificent self-portrait of Teja.
The KGB were waiting for the endgame. All through his glory days, Nureyev was pained by the separation from his beloved mother.
In 1987 she was dying, and Mikhail Gorbachev finally granted him free passage to visit her. But it was already too late for recognition, let alone meaningful communication, and his anguish was compounded by a general cold shoulder in his home town of Ufa.
He was turned away at his old school, and berated in the art gallery. At the theatre, his old colleagues had mysteriously been given the day off. Some had been told not to answer the phone, while others had been sent out of town on spurious excursions.
Two years later, he fulfilled a dream to return to the Kirov stage. But again it was too late.
He was now 51, and hoped to perform a matching character part. But the Kirov authorities insisted on a youthful classical role – Albrecht in Giselle, which had launched his partnership with Margot Fonteyn more than 25 years before, or James in La Sylphide. They must have known these were beyond him.
The conductor, Robert Luther, remembers him asking where "the bitches" were who had denounced him after his defection, and then greeting a former ballerina effusively while muttering "here comes number one" under his breath.
But Nureyev was weak from Aids, and the dress rehearsal was a physical torment, as his old rival, Boris Bregvadze, observed: "On stage he was really bad. I left after the first act, because I didn't want to carry on watching a frail and ill Rudi struggle."
It was his second cruel homecoming. Both Nureyev and the KGB were in their twilight years. But the KGB had perhaps had the satisfaction of revenge.
When the curtain rose to reveal Nureyev asleep on a couch, the Kirov audience erupted in applause so long that the conductor had to stop the orchestra and start again. But when he tried to dance, the legend began to crumble. The modern audience wondered what all the fuss was about.
His one-time partner, the French dancer Ghislaine Thesmar, says it was important for him to "close the circle. He went on stage to dance like some people go to the temple and pray when they can't walk any more. That effort is sacred."
For Faina Rokhind in Gatchinskaya Street, it was a reward for her years of devotion.
"It was like a fairy tale, a miracle. I couldn't believe my eyes that I was once again seeing Rudolf on stage. It was a sign of the changing times. I was euphoric."
- John Bridcut wrote and produced Nureyev: From Russia With Love, to be broadcast on BBC2 on Sept 22
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/3667963/The-KGBs-long-war-against-Rudolf-Nureyev.html
